Posts from the ‘Reading Updates’ Category

The Art Of The Sentence Bomb

Have you ever been reading along in a book, appreciating the author’s style, the story, the character and setting descriptions, when all of the sudden, out of nowhere, like a big pile of space debris that lands in your backyard, the author drops a earth-shattering bomb on the plot?

I’m sure there’s probably a literary term for this, but I can’t recall what it might be. So I’ll simply call it a “sentence bomb.”

Carson McCullers is an expert at this. At least three or four times during The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, she has thrown in one sentence–ONE SENTENCE–out of nowhere, that changes everything in her story.

For those of you who might want to read this book, I won’t quote an example from the book because it would be too much of a spoiler. So I’ll come up with my own amateurish example of what a sentence bomb might look like:

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Here’s One For The Misfits

One of the things I like about The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter—at least to this point—is its representation of the misfits of society—the people who are forgotten (at worst) and underappreciated (at best).

McCullers writes about Mr. Singer, a deaf and mute man who is called “dumb and mute” by the townsfolk. There’s Mick Kelly, a tall, gangly, and awkward 14-year-old girl who takes care of her younger siblings while dreaming of a better life.

There’s Dr. Copeland, the angry and preachy African-American doctor who sees communism as the solution to racism and prejudice.

And then there’s Jake Blount, essentially the town drunk, who befriends Singer and uses the deaf man as a sounding board for his own religious and political views.

During one such episode, Blount possibly sums up the premise of the entire novel—the point of view of these people, the misfits of their community.

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